depistemology

2011-12-09T09:29:00.003-06:00

A global theory of consciousness - vectors; 1 homeostatic process and emotion 2 language and recursive memory 3 narratives and uncertainty

1 Collective homeostasis as emotion; origin in brain stem, driver of physical adaptation, autonomic expression.

2 Language as prerequisite for recursive memory thus conception of time and self; origin in mid-brain, driver of cognitive adaptation, sub-conscious expression.

3 Narrative as the mediator of uncertainty; growth in cortex, driver of social adaptation, conscious expression.

2011-10-06T08:41:00.002-06:00

Steve Jobs helped democratize information. His company also outsourced jobs to undeveloped regions and helped millions rise out of poverty. But those factories also drove their employees to the brink with long working hours and bleak conditions and the result was a rash of suicides.

Now everyone who chooses to work for a living in the developed world is learning, with the help of IT like Apple, that prolonged high unemployment means that their life is being devalued whether they are lucky to have a job or not. And while that also means that millions of people in undeveloped countries now dream of eating meat and driving a car for the first time, they also realize that in a global economy those benefits can vanish as fast as they appeared if they do not work long hours without benefits.

Workers in a globalized economy are expendable. People who work for a living are being devalued, whether they have a job or not and whether they live in a developed country or not. And the governments who represent those people have been bought off by the 1% and refuse to see the problem. That is what Occupy is about.

2011-08-11T07:43:00.001-06:00

The design of consciousness serves the function of the body and the body serves the function of the species. The function of the species is self preservation and reproduction within the parameters of homeostasis possible in the environment. So species adapt to environmental conditions and individuals seek homeostasis with the adaptations acquired by evolutionary selection. Consciousness serves the individual by using homeostasis to guide and adapt the individual to changing environmental conditions.

A homeostatic system is the biological thermostat that seeks to maintain the equilibrium of hundreds of interacting parameters such as body temperature, blood sugar, blood pressure etc. The collective expression of all of our homeostatic systems, all of those floating set points reacting and adjusting to each other, constitutes emotion. A common zen metaphor for consciousness is a body of water. Emotion is the surface, the collective expression of homeostatic processes in search of equilibrium.

The evolutionary purpose of emotion in this model is to focus our consciousness on those variables in our environment that are vital to our survival. The waves and troughs of homeostatic imbalance trigger the formation of long chain neurological processes that associate body states, sensory stimuli and the memories of previous homeostatic imbalances to initiate engagement in the environment and to form new memories that connect need with action and reward. Emotion helps us separate and memorize adaptive knowledge from the ocean of everyday experience.

So emotion could be seen as a meta-level assessment of our ecological status as an individual and as a species because our individual emotions are also unconsciously informed by the sensory input of others and the homeostatic expressions of social movements.

Reason is the means to socialize that emotional knowledge. We like to think think that rationality is built on the premises of shared facts but individually we base our reason on a foundation of deeply felt memories. Discourse then becomes the mediation of those memories into culture.

So the contentious debate about whether we are broke or competitive or growing or shrinking is the social mediation of our emotional assessment of whether we need to hunker down in hostile protection of what we have or open ourselves to the risk and reward of cooperative endeavors. Is economic growth still possible or do we need to make a conceptual shift about our limits in order to enable cooperation within a zero-sum game?

2011-08-11T04:41:00.005-06:00

Globalisation is undermining the basic stability of nation states. The globalisation of labor markets hollows out the middle class in developed nations and spurs the rise in incomes among the poor in developing nations. But the corporate class that benefits the most from the economies of scale of globalisation has no allegiance to any nation state anymore, labor is disposable and subject to arbitrage. So there is no incentive to pay for the physical and institutional infrastructure that nation states provide, corporations can just hop to the next developing nation willing to bid down the price of labor.

Global supply chains turn nations into specialized units in the chain so whole sectors of a nations economy are decimated in the interest of global efficiency but the result is that nations become less self-sufficient and more dependent on globally supplied commodities and services.

So nation states have less control over their economies, are less able to generate dependable revenues and less able to provide basic services to their citizens.

But the externalities of doing business - pollution, infrastructure, social disruption and resource depletion - are only externalities within the economies of nation states subject to global arbitrage. In a globalized economy there are no externalities, only delayed costs. And now we are all beginning to pay for those costs.

2010-03-04T20:46:00.009-06:00

Evidence-based certainty uses rationality to gradually prove or disprove theories based on empirical evidence. Belief-based certainty works in the other direction, the desired certainty is already known and rationality is abused to build on carefully selected evidence to “prove” that belief.

Belief-based certainty will always have a higher value socially and politically in the short term because it satisfies the immediate need for certainty. If a belief is repeated within a media echo chamber and supports the desire for absolute certainty then it becomes a political certainty for those that need it.

Evidence-based inquiry is a process that only produces a gradually increasing probability of certainty in the long term. Facts will lose the news cycle but quietly win the cultural war.

2010-03-04T19:38:00.009-06:00

Markets mediate the uncertainty of survival and governments mediate the uncertainty of markets. The uncertainties of competition in the market motivates individuals to create efficiencies and innovations in order to enjoy the greater certainties of wealth. Government regulates the market to insure competition where it works to create opportunities and replaces the market where it restricts opportunities and exploits inequalities.

So the uncertainty of competition is both the bull that drives the economy and the bear that everyone seeks shelter from. Government has to both enable and disable the uncertainty of competition for the greater good.

Those on the left seek shelter from uncertainty in public sector employment, labor unions and government programs that provide a safety net where markets fail as in education and health care. Those on the right seek shelter from uncertainty in government contracts, government regulations that protect businesses from competition and public funding of the externalities of business which includes the costs of infrastructure, pollution and periodic market failures of the financial system.

Neither side wants to pay for the other side’s protection racket. Both sides have to be kept in check and both are prone to their own particular kind of corruption.

But when multinational corporations cooperate to pit one country against another to create a regulation free global business environment then those corporations have the upper hand and that only creates certainties for a tiny minority at the top and cascading waves of uncertainty and disruption for everybody else.

2010-03-03T22:33:00.007-06:00

Politics can be mapped with just two variables - wealth and tolerance of uncertainty. When an individual accumulates a certain amount of wealth their orientation shifts from seeking change to benefit themselves to seeking security to protect what they have accumulated. That point varies from person to person depending on their individual tolerance for uncertainty, the more tolerance for uncertainty a person has the less they seek security from their fellow citizens.

2007-01-03T12:17:00.001-06:00

If God is what we do not know then prayer is curiosity, love is faith and sin is acting as if we know what God is.

2006-12-14T23:07:00.004-06:00

Analysis deals with a set of knowns and ignores everything outside of the set. But when we consider context first, including what we do not know about a situation, we are confronted with the assumptions that we use to deal with the unknown; religion, superstition, folklore, conventional wisdom and the prevailing cultural norms. So when we consider context before analysis it becomes clear that the underlying currency of our cultural transactions is certainty based on either evidence or belief.

Those are two interconnected sets of certainties, our physical limitations within our environment and a cultural set of shared symbols and values. Our language and shared beliefs help us mediate the uncertainties of our physical existence. Those beliefs are embedded in a personal narrative.

If you were to closely observed someone throughout one day you would find that they acted in ways that reflected a broad range of beliefs. Survival requires adaptability, sometimes we need to be absolutists (to respond to challenges that threaten our welbeing) and sometimes we need to be relativists (to understand the challenges in order to learn from them). However if you asked that person to explain their actions throughout the day you would probably find that they defined their behavior in a narrow singular sense. We like to have a narrative that we can wrap all of the uncertainties of the world—and perhaps more importantly, the uncertainties of ourselves—into a compelling story.

The emotional context of our experience may determine the narrative of how we mediate the unknown. If we feel our past was chaotic then we seek absolute explanations of problems and solutions. If we feel our past was restricted we resist singular deterministic explanations. We all use absolute and relative judgements but explain those judgements in partisan terms to maintain our consistency.

Our narratives do determine many of our decisions but they do not limit our choices. The danger lies when our narrative overrules our intuition, when absolutists impose their judgements upon everyone else and relativists refuse to judge themselves.

2006-12-05T10:41:00.000-06:00

2006-12-02T15:20:00.002-06:00

If God is what we do not know then we are as God to the experience of others and others are as God to our experience.